My Blog has moved! In my learning about computers and whatnot, I decided to buy the domain hildawg.com so that I could use the Raygun4Wordpress Plugin myself, and understand Raygun better, as well as learn a thing or two about error reporting.

So far, I am more confused – but I’m hoping this will change at some point 🙂

I will not let you beat me, little bundle of odd symbols! Even though I wish for a cat to soothe me to sleep after hours of crying about you. (Click this awful image for more info).

The Correlation Coefficient formula

It terrifies me. Even just its general shape is painful to the eye – it’s all pointy and sharp. It’s like being in that one episode of Game of Thrones where they stabbed and sliced everyone to death with their swords and daggers… oh wait, that was every episode.

What was even more upsetting to me upon coming across this wee symbol of death in the biostatistics course I’m doing, was to learn that this messy bundle of numbers merely works out a relationship between x and y, and it can only be within the realm of 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1.

Which basically just suggests whether x and y have a strong, medium or weak relationship. What the hell! Why all the crazy symbols then?

And let me tell you, I really wish those two would just sort it out. I don’t want to have to mess around with this horrid formula every time you guys are having relationship problems! And really y, what are you doing going back to your x anyway? Can only lead to trouble.

That was a terrible pun, and I apologise – but I’ve been rendered incapable of sufficient wittiness by the imminent math anxiety bought on by the commencement of this statistics course.

It turns out there is a plethora of info and studies about mathematical anxiety. I personally reckon mine stems from the way maths was taught when I was a child. We were taught what to do, but not why. I like to think that the way education has moved in New Zealand, the emphasis is more on why we need to find x, and not just how.

People who are mean about my enjoyment of vegetables

I just don’t really like to eat meat. For a variety of reasons, and I’m not even going to have a rant about it – and I don’t unless someone is insistent on getting all upset about the fact I don’t choose to eat animal products.

Which happens all the time.

I really don’t understand it, and it’s kinda offensive. If someone were to get all up in another someone’s face -unprovoked- for being religious, it would be considered inappropriate, and you would probably consider the person to be a bit of a dick. It’s their belief, and is likely important to them.

I eat like I give a fuck, and yet I won’t ever make a big deal of other people eating what they want – unless they challenge me first. Then it’s all on!

Shania Twain

Seriously, this has been in my head for WEEKS.

To explain, I am the only lady in the company – and therefore the office. I also live with two other dudes, which means that I can get through entire days without any contact whatsoever with another female – unless you count Bonnie the cat. Who I’m pretty sure hates me.

And mostly I really like it – we have fun, inappropriate comments flow freely and guys are generally easier to be around than girls.

But then one day when I realised that every time I go somewhere in a car I sit with my legs apart like a bloke called Bruce who is probably a builder, likes Metallica and prefers his hair short at the top and long at the back – I wondered, “am I forgetting that I’m a lady?”.

So naturally I listened to some Shania, because she too once forgot she was a lady… and have had ‘Man, I feel like a woman’ in my head for so long.

I’m not actually that perplexed about this at all. It is what it is.

That is all

So to sum it up, I am primarily perplexed about a formula of trickery, vegetable hatred and a Canadian country singer who quite frankly understands my feelings. Girlfriend deserves her fame!

Today I’m going to talk about two SAAS based error logging solutions for .NET; Raygun.io and Airbrake.io. I was recently contacted by the community manager for Raygun and was asked to give their solution a try. I was already using Airbrake but had not been very impressed with the level of detail we were getting with Airbrake. While Airbrake was working really well for our Ruby based projects it wasn’t reporting the same level of details for our .NET projects. I decided to give Raygun a try and I’m super happy that I did. Let me cover some of the reasons why I like Raygun over Airbrake.

Raygun provides a super easy implementation to get started with using their product. You can download their library from NuGet via searching for their package name; Mindscape.Raygun4Net. Once Raygun is installed into the project you are working on, you are ready to go…